Ex Officio Page 19

  She gave him a quick sidelong glance, and faced front again. “What did you tell him?”

  “Tell him?” They stepped out of the trees at that moment, and he hung back to see where she would go next. Her pace slowed, and she strolled down across the grass toward the pond’s edge. The sunlight seemed hotter after walking amid the trees.

  He said, “He didn’t ask me anything specific. Just if I’d come down here today.”

  She nodded, looking out across the pond. A blue child’s sneaker lay in the grass to their left, but other than that they might have been the first humans ever to stand here. He turned back, shielding his eyes, and could just make out the house through the trees. He wouldn’t have been able to see it if he hadn’t known it was there.

  She said, “What will you tell him?”

  It was an odd question, under the circumstances. He looked at her again, and she was still gazing somberly out across the pond. He said, “I have no idea. I didn’t think the question would come up. Not out in the open, not with him.”

  She turned her head then, to frown at him. “I don’t understand.”

  “I imagine,” he said, “this is as embarrassing for you as it is for me, but I suppose the only thing to do is play along with him. Up to a—”

  “Play along with him? Just sit back and let him make a fool of himself?”

  Now it was Robert’s turn to fail to understand. “How does he make a fool of himself? He takes an interest in you, that’s all, it’s a natural thing to do.”

  Her frown deepened, and something like suspicion suddenly came into her eyes. “Mr. Pratt,” she said, “just what do you think we’re talking about?”

  “Well—your grandfather.”

  “What about him? Why do you think he wanted to see you today?”

  “To see you,” he said, shrugging because it was so obvious. And becoming increasingly embarrassing.

  And she was becoming angry. “Is that right? My grandfather is matchmaking for me, is that it?”

  “Isn’t he?”

  “Of course not! You have an inflated opinion of yourself, Mr. Pratt, and too low an opinion of everyone else. Bradford Lockridge has better things to do than be a marriage broker, and even if he didn’t I wouldn’t require the service!”

  “Well, he was,” Robert said defensively.

  “He was what?”

  “A matchmaker. That’s what my other visit was all about. Elizabeth let it slip on the way back.”

  An angry denial never quite got spoken. She paused with the words still in her throat, and uncertainty spread a frown on her face. “Elizabeth?”

  “In the car on the way back.” Robert was feeling more and more uncomfortable about all this. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but I misunderstood you. I thought you knew about it, too, and that’s what you wanted to talk about.”

  “Well, if it was Elizabeth’s idea, why should Bradford have anything to do with it?”

  “The way I understood it, they talked it over among themselves. Bradford had you on his hands, and Elizabeth had me.” He tried a tentative grin, hoping they could find some gentle way out of this morass, and said, “I suppose the idea was they’d unload us both at the same time.”

  She lowered her head, casting a quick mutinous glance in the direction of the house, saying, “That’s humiliating.”

  “Well, me, too. I get hauled down here like a prize stud. But you can’t blame them, older people like to mess around in younger people’s affairs.”

  “Not Bradford,” she said. “That’s beneath him.”

  “Apparently not. But the point is, I’m sorry I brought it up, since that isn’t what the summons was about this time. Or is it?”

  She glanced up at him, squinting a bit in the sunlight, looking annoyed and embarrassed and irritated and much livelier than at any point in the course of their last meeting. She said, “Or is it? What do you mean?”

  “He obviously gave you some other reason for my visit this time, but maybe it was just a cover-up and he’s back doing Hello, Dolly! again.”

  “Oh, no,” she said, shaking her head with finality. “I only wish it were,” she said, and looked out over the pond, then turned back quickly to say, “Don’t misunderstand that.”

  “I don’t. What does he want me for?”

  “Advice,” she said. “That’s why I wanted to talk to you first, give you a chance to think about what to say to him when he asks you.”

  “Advice? From me?”

  “You’re a history teacher, aren’t you? American history?”

  “Yes?”

  “Well, Bradford’s decided he needs advice from a history teacher, and that is why he sent for you.”

  “What kind of advice?” he asked, still thinking it had to be a mask some way to cover continued matchmaking. Why should Bradford Lockridge want advice from an obscure young history teacher? It made no sense.

  “Suggestions for his campaign,” she answered, and twisted the words with a surprising amount of bitterness. Robert sensed in her attitude that her own advice had been neither sought nor heeded. Was it usually? Perhaps.

  Then the word she’d used caught up with his thinking and he said, “Campaign?”

  She shook her head, in annoyance rather than negation, and faced him to say, “Bradford’s decided to run for Congress.”

  iii

  EVELYN DIDN’T JOIN THEM for lunch. Whether that was an expression of her disapproval or not Robert didn’t know, but he did know she was making her disapproval evident, and he could see that Lockridge understood the meaning of her expression and her silences. An uneasy wordless truce stretched taut within the household.

  Lunch was a respite from that, obviously, with Lockridge relaxing in the presence of his visitors from outside, of which there were two others in addition to Robert.

  Opposite Robert sat a solidly-built man of about fifty, Dr. Joseph Holt, Lockridge’s personal physician, whose brother (Evelyn’s father) had apparently been married to Lockridge’s daughter. Robert remembered hearing Dr. Holt’s name mentioned at the end of his last visit here, when Lockridge had some sort of attack and Evelyn was told that Dr. Holt had been sent for. Given the circumstances, he had built up a vague mental image of Dr. Holt as a tall, grim, cadaverous man with deepset eyes and no optimism, but in the flesh he was much heartier and healthier than that, a pleasant cheerful man who reminded Robert most of a type occasionally found on campus: an older man, a professor, whose outlook and interests had (without degradation to himself) remained young and in touch with his students. Dr. Holt led the small talk during lunch, and Robert found himself enjoying the man greatly.

  The other visitor, to his left, was a different type entirely. Though probably a decade younger than Dr. Holt, in his early forties, this man gave the impression of being much older, much more settled and weighty in his manner. His name was Leonard Orr, and he was a local politician of apparently some importance, being both mayor of a nearby town and the county chairman of the political party to which Bradford Lockridge also belonged. He was a stout man with a broad solemn face and thinning hair, and his eyeglasses had clear plastic frames. He said little, and that judiciously. At first, Robert thought Leonard Orr pompous beyond belief, but finally he realized that Orr was merely over-awed by Bradford Lockridge. A town mayor and county chairman, at the table of a former President of the United States, would have to be over-awed.

  They ate in a different dining room from the last time, this one smaller and on the first floor, a green and white room with a wall of tiny-paned windows overlooking a good part of the orchard, the rows of pear and peach and apple trees lush with leaves and ripening fruit in the sunlight. Whether the house was air-conditioned or just naturally cool Robert couldn’t tell.

  He had been braced for Lockridge to bring up the subject of Congress from the instant he entered the man’s presence, but Lockridge was in no hurry to get to it, allowing Dr. Holt to lead the small talk, which the doctor did gracefully, drawing anecdot
es of college life from Robert and of his recent European visit from Lockridge. Leonard Orr, for whom today’s invitation was obviously a rarity, clearly was too conscious of protecting his dignity to descend into anecdote, limiting himself to the sort of portentous statement that made John Bartlett famous.

  There was excellent rice pudding for dessert, followed by coffee. After the coffee had been served, Lockridge turned to Robert and said, “What do you know about John Quincy Adams?”

  The topic had come out of midair. Robert finished pouring cream into his coffee, passed the pitcher to Orr, and said, “John Quincy? Sixth President of the United States.”

  “A specialist in American history should know more than that,” Lockridge said.

  Robert looked at him in surprise, to see that he was smiling but that he really wanted an answer. “You want a capsule biography of John Quincy Adams?”

  “Yes, please.”

  “Well, let’s see. Dates. 1767. That’s an easy one to remember, nine years before 1776. Died, uh—18—”

  “1848,” Lockridge said.

  Robert gave a tentative grin. “I have the feeling you boned up for this one, sir.”

  “Admitted. But tell me more.”

  “You’re going to know more than me, I can feel it,” Robert said, and shrugged. “But I’m game. John Quincy Adams. The only President’s son ever to be elected President himself. He was elected in 1824, even though he didn’t have a plurality of the popular vote or even of the electoral college. Andrew Jackson beat him on both. But because nobody had a majority, the election was decided in the House, where Henry Clay threw his support to Adams, which squeaked him in.”

  Dr. Holt said, “Isn’t that what we were all worried about a few years ago? Nixon, Humphrey, Wallace. That it would get decided in the House, and Wallace would have the spoiler votes.”

  Robert smiled at him, nodding. “Yes, sir, it had already happened. And the Republic still stands.”

  “Not quite as tall, perhaps,” Dr. Holt said.

  Lockridge forestalled that one by saying, “Let’s stay in the nineteenth century a little longer, Joe. Go on, Robert.”

  “Well, Adams snuck into the White House under Andrew Jackson in 1824, but four years later, in 1828, Jackson defeated him more conclusively and took over.”

  “Justice triumphant,” Dr. Holt said.

  Lockridge said, “Don’t be cynical, Joe. Go on, Robert.”

  “Well, after Jackson defeated him in 1828, he retired to his home in Massachusetts for two years, but then in 1830 he—” Robert came to an abrupt stop, his expression startled by the realization of what he’d been about to say.

  Lockridge was smiling in satisfaction. He said, “I suspected Evelyn had managed to intercept you on the way in, to warn you against me. Well, go on, Robert. What did ex-President Adams do in 1830?”

  Robert looked at Dr. Holt and Leonard Orr and saw them both watching him, mildly curious but no more, neither of them suspecting a thing. He said, “He stood for election to the House of Representatives.”

  “And he won,” Lockridge said, his manner as satisfied as if he personally had bet and made money on it.

  “Yes, sir,” Robert said.

  “So I’m not exactly without precedent, am I, Robert?”

  “Well, sir, 1830—”

  “Andrew Johnson, out of the Presidency in 1868,” Lockridge said, “became Senator from Tennessee in 1875.”

  “A lot has changed since then, Mr. Lockridge. The concept of the Presi—”

  “I’d prefer you to call me Bradford. And I know the concept of the Presidency. An ex-President is supposed to be a walking museum, with historical markers tattooed on interesting portions of his anatomy. I don’t believe there’s been one ex-President this century who hasn’t chafed under that. Wasn’t it Harry Truman who complained that people were calling him a statesman and he wasn’t dead yet?”

  “Yes, sir, but—”

  “Eisenhower didn’t like it, Johnson hates it. Herbert Hoover spent the rest of his life begging his successors to appoint him to commissions.”

  Dr. Holt and Leonard Orr had been listening to this conversation with growing bewilderment, and it was Dr. Holt who got the glimmer first, suddenly saying, “Wait a second! Brad, what are you up to?”

  Lockridge turned his amused expression from Robert to the doctor, saying, “Odd you should ask that, since it’s exactly what I intended to ask you. What am I up to, Joe, what am I capable of?”

  “Mentally, anything,” Dr. Holt said. “Physically, that’s another matter.”

  “You mother-henned me on the Paris trip, and nothing happened. No attack, nothing. In fact, I haven’t had a bit of trouble since the time you were here, Robert, when was that?”

  “In May, sir. May twelfth, I think.”

  “May twelfth. What’s today, August sixth. Almost three months.”

  “That doesn’t mean it’s over,” Dr. Holt said. Lockridge was still talking in a half-joking manner, but the doctor was now in deadly earnest.

  “I’m not over either, Joe. I’m not dead yet, and I’m frankly sick of being buried.” He looked at Leonard Orr, sitting opposite him, and said, “Len, what’s the only elected post of any significance around here that we don’t have?”

  Orr pursed his lips, as though the subject required study, but he answered quickly enough: “Representative. And we’ll never get it, not while George Meecham is alive.”

  “You could with the right candidate,” Lockridge told him. “How long’s he been in now, Len?”

  “Nine years, since he defeated my Dad.”

  Lockridge’s expression shadowed for a second, but then he smiled again, a bit grimly, and said, “That’s right, I’d forgotten. I took a number of Congressmen with me when I went down to defeat, including Walt.” Turning to Robert again, he said, “I held that post for eight years, till I was elected Senator. When I left the House, Len’s father took my place. Stayed there twenty-four years.” To Orr again he said, “How’d you like to dump George Meecham next year, Len?”

  “I’d love it,” Orr said, flat, declarative, not joking at all.

  “Given the right candidate,” Lockridge told him, “you could do it.”

  “But where’s the right candidate, Brad?” Orr, astonishingly enough, still didn’t know what was going on.

  Lockridge now told him. “Right here,” he said, and pointed at himself.

  Orr frowned at him, failing to understand for another half a minute then suddenly sat back—the chair groaned beneath him—and cried, “You?”

  Lockridge just smiled.

  Dr. Holt said, “Brad, it isn’t done. It just isn’t done.”

  “I don’t know what to say,” Orr said.

  Lockridge said to the doctor, “John Quincy Adams did it. Andrew Johnson did it, too, didn’t he, Robert?”

  “Yes, he did,” Robert said. “Of course, that didn’t work out as well.”

  “He died in office,” Lockridge said. “I can’t think of a better way to go.”

  Dr. Holt, grasping at straws, looked across at Robert and said, “How old was Adams when he went into Congress ?

  “After his Presidency?” Robert did some quick mental arithmetic, and said, “Sixty-three.”

  Lockridge said to the doctor, “If I know anything about medicine, sixty-three was older in 1830 than seventy-one is today.”

  “It depends on the individual,” Dr. Holt said.

  “George Meecham is how old now, Len?”

  Orr was still recovering from the shock of Lockridge’s announcement, and it took him a second to reorganize his thoughts. Then he said, “Seventy-five, I believe.”

  Lockridge chuckled and said, “Time for that old man to retire, let some young blood in. Wouldn’t you say so, Joe?”

  Still clutching gamely at the same straw, the doctor appealed to Robert again, saying, “How much longer did Adams live? And how many terms did he serve?”

  Robert shook his head, having no he
lp to give him. “He lived eighteen years,” he said, “And he died in office.”

  “They didn’t bury him till he was dead,” Lockridge said.

  Dr. Holt finally abandoned that straw, saying, “Age isn’t the issue anyway. It’s your position that’s the issue, Brad, and you know it. I realize you chafe at the bit—”

  “Do you, Joe?”

  The doctor stopped, and studied Lockridge’s face for a minute. Then, more soberly, he said, “Well, maybe I don’t. Not completely.”

  “I’ve been active all my life,” Lockridge said, and once again he seemed to be talking more to Robert than the other two, both of whom probably already knew most of what he was now saying. “Out of Harvard Law School,” he said, “I went straight into my father-in-law’s law firm up in Boston, and believe me I didn’t marry into any soft job. They worked their young men in those days.”

  Robert said, “Was that Collins, Wellington, Smart?”

  Lockridge was surprised. “You know them?”

  “A friend of mine works there now,” Robert said. “John Bloor. He married Deborah, Walter Wellington’s daughter.”

  “I haven’t kept in very close touch with the Wellingtons the last few years,” Lockridge said.

  “Anyway,” Robert said, “he tells me they still work their young men up there.”

  Lockridge smiled in reminiscence. “I’ll bet they do.” He looked serious again and said, “All right. I stayed there eight years, and then came down here and stood for Congress. I was in the House for eight years and in the Senate for twenty, and during most of that time I was a pretty active party man as well. Wasn’t I, Len?”

  “You certainly were,” Len said, and it was clearly sincere.

  “State and national,” Lockridge said. “I tore my hair through I can’t tell you how many conventions. Then the Presidency for four years. I was sixty-two years old at the end of that, and believe me I wasn’t ready to retire. I wouldn’t have tried for a second term if I felt like quitting. But I was retired, whether I wanted it or not. I’ve been active, I’ve been interested and involved, I’ve been in the absolute middle of the action all my life, and all at once it stops, as though somebody turned a switch. Now I’m the old man of the mountain and the middle-aged boys come to me every four years at convention time to try to get my endorsement, and it doesn’t matter a tinker’s damn whether they get it or not. In between times I sit around writing my memoirs—I’m the museum and the curator—or every once in a while I’ll go in to New York City and make a thirty second television film for physical fitness. If somebody important dies, they may ask me to the funeral, and even if they do I don’t get that excited about it. I’ve been put out to pasture while my legs and my lungs are still good, and this fellow here says he understands why I chafe at the bit.”